Fritinancy

Words of the year 2021: Fritinancy edition

Covid-19 turned into Covid 2021, the U.S. presidency changed hands despite TFG’s efforts to the contrary, and we somehow summoned the energy to invent new words and repurpose old ones. Here are my picks for this year’s keywords; scroll to the bottom for previous years’ lists. And stay tuned for the American Dialect Society’s selection of the word of the year on January 7.

My criteria are the ADS’s: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2021. 

In alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Omicron

Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.

The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.

How did we jump from fourth letter to fifteenth? The New York Times explains:

Word of the week: Oneiric

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, some people took up sourdough baking, others began studying a new language or learning to play an instrument. My preferred pastime was, and remains, film noir. Over the last eighteen months I’ve watched more than 100 noirs, many of them more than once, from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, from 1958, is often considered the last true film noir; I saw it once in a theater, years ago, and plan to see it again soon, after I’ve crossed a few never-watched titles off my list—Decoy (1946), Railroaded! (1947), and The Chase (1946) currently top the queue. I just can’t seem to get enough of corrupt cops, washed-up boxers, double-crossing dames, and hard-boiled shamuses.

I’ve been supplementing my screenings with books, articles, and videos about noir. (For a partial list, as well as ways to stream film noirs, see the end of this post.) It was in one of those books, Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction*, by James Naremore, that I came across this week’s word, oneiric, which sent me to a dictionary. It’s pronounced with a long-I sound in the middle—oh-NIGH-rick—and it comes from a Greek source, although relatively recently. It means “related to dreams.”

Word of the week: Mjolnir

The pharmaceutical company Merck announced on October 1 that its new oral antiviral medication reduced by about 50 percent the risk of hospitalization and death in people with mild or moderate cases of COVID-19, and that it would seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its use in the US.

The new drug’s generic name: molnupiravir.

Multisyllabic pharmaceutical names are of course nothing new. What’s unusual is molnupiravir’s origin, and the fact that Merck has publicly discussed the naming story.

Dean Li, Merck’s head of research and development, told the medical publication Stat News:

“Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right — you know, it’s named after Thor’s hammer [Mjollnir], this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant.”

“The mighty Thor cannot reach his enchanged hammer! Is this to be Loki’s final victory???”: Marvel Comics

August linkfest

The rise of rifle logos in American branding: “[T]he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 … put the US on a war footing for the next two decades and boosted the rifle’s prominence in the national psyche. While pistols have been the chosen weapons of traditional pop culture stars like spies, cops, and gunslingers, military combat prioritizes the rifle, and today’s gun logos reflect that.” (By James I. Bowie for Emblemetric)

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Speaking of guns (h/t Iva Cheung):

Here you go. The most American possible explanation of the Delta variant, and why it means you should get vaccinated and wear a mask, more than ever. pic.twitter.com/3dkSBLxWeX

— Dylan Meconis (@dmeconis) August 12, 2021

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Name in the news: Comirnaty

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today granted full approval to the COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech. The vaccine, which will be marketed as Comirnaty (generic name tozinameran), had been administered under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) since December 11, 2020; more than 200 million doses have been administered in the U.S. since that date.

The Comirnaty name didn’t just appear out of the blue today. I mentioned it in a May 2021 column on vaccination terminology and vaccine names. And Fierce Pharma reported on it back in December 2020, interviewing Scott Piergrossi, president of operations and communications at Brand Institute, the pharma-naming agency that developed the name for Pfizer-BioNTech. “The name is coined from Covid-19 immunity, and then embeds the mRNA in the middle, which is the platform technology, and as a whole the name is meant to evoke the word community,” Piergrossi told Fierce Pharma:

Word of the week: Spreadneck

I try to stay on top of all the new words that have been inspired by the coronavirus pandemic—see here and here, and links therein—but inevitably a coinage sometimes slips by. That was the case with spreadneck, which emerged in the summer of 2020 as a synonym for covidiot and lately has evolved into something closer to “ignorant or stubborn anti-vaxer.” It finally caught my attention in early August.

July linkfest

I haven’t recommended a book in a while, so this month I’m recommending two, both of them new, both of them about language. (And each one blurbed by the author of the other one, which must be a coincidence, right?)

June linkfest

“Controversial terms, from ‘abortion’ to ‘Zionism,’ tend to shut down dialog because they mean different things to different people.” The AllSides Red Blue Dictionary defines these hot-button terms across the political spectrum: “Until we fully understand what a term means to someone else, we don't know the issue and can't effectively communicate.”

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I’m enjoying (and learning from) the short essays Susan Orlean publishes on Medium, especially her stories about  the writing craft. Here she is on beginnings and on endings.

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After a four-month hiatus I’m back on Medium myself with some reflections on fifteen years of blogging. (And here’s your annoying-but-obligatory reminder that Medium contributors earn money from their stories only if enough people “clap” for them, and that up to 50 claps per story are allowable, nay, encouraged.)

On the Visual Thesaurus: Vax vocab

Ever since the pandemic began in early 2020, I’ve kept track of the ways in which COVID-19 has influenced the way we talk and write. In my May column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the latest corona-cabulary trend: vaccination words. From the names of pharmaceutical companies like Moderna—coined not from modern but from modified and RNA—to inventions like vaxhole and Fauci ouchie, we continue to make linguistic lemonade out of pandemic lemons.

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s a preview: